Back in April, I wrote a post about how Amazon was getting in the destination business with hotels. It seemed to be a somewhat natural progressive step for the online fulfillment giant to provide yet one more service to their millions of customers. It seemed like a good idea and one that Amazon’s huge back-end and customer base could turn into some great deals for travel.
Amazon Closes The Door On Their Hotel Booking Service
Bye, bye Amazon Destinations – we hardly knew you!
But, Amazon couldn’t deliver the hotel services after all. They stopped allowing reservations as of yesterday but assured customers with reservations already booked that they would be honored. To check on your reservations, click here.
It is a rare thing to find Amazon backing out of a business angle. True, there are some things that they should have removed themselves from (ahem, cellphones) but they are normally able to just push through anyway because these products and services have always served as loss leaders for their other services. That is not the case with hotels, though, so they have closed that door. All is not lost, however, as they did say they have “learned a lot.” I guess if that happens, it is not a total failure! I would assume that one of the things they learned is that this was not the best fit for their customers as far as what the customers come to them for.
Did you use Amazon Destinations during their brief period of operations? Any thoughts on your experience?
Source: Bloomberg
I wonder if Amazon Local is next on the chopping block.
I did read that they also pulled the hotel/destination deals from Amazon Local as well. Hopefully that is all they are cutting. I think they had put a huge investment in Local so they would probably have to be losing quite a bit to shut it down.